The advantage traditional paper-based media has always had over
electronic media is that the consumer doesn't have to bear the cost
of the technology up front. If you buy a book or a magazine, the
technology that enables its production and transmission is already
built in.

The cost of the device can turn an electronic media gadget into
a prestige device, like Apple's iPod or iPad. But it's nevertheless
a hurdle for customers. $500 for an iPad or $400 for the
first-generation Kindle is a lot of cash to drop for folks who want
to read. It's also a levee bottling up a torrent of content that
can be sold and delivered over those devices.

With Amazon's new $79 Kindle, $99 Kindle Touch, $149 Kindle
Touch 3G, and $199 Kindle Fire, Amazon dynamites that levee. The
devices aren't free, but they're so much cheaper than comparable
products on the market that they will likely sell millions of
copies and many more millions of books, television shows, movies,
music and apps.

The digital divide between haves and have-nots just potentially
got a lot smaller.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the four new devices at a New
York press conference on Wednesday morning. He seemed delighted to
begin with the surprise new Kindles, and slow-play the long-awaited
tablet -- which dropped at a price much lower than most analysts
earlier this week had guessed.

"Four years ago, we set out to improve upon the book," Bezos
said. The first iteration of the Kindle was greeted with
skepticism, Bezos says, even from thoughtful, well-meaning people,
who noted that Amazon had to create demand not only for the device,
but for the content that fills the device. Unlike Apple -- which
benefited from Napster and CD ripping to popularize MP3s -- Amazon
had to make e-books popular, too.

"Kindle is an end-to-end service," Bezos said. Amazon not only
sells books, but delivers them directly to users' devices and
stores them free of charge in the cloud. And it delivers and syncs
those books anywhere, not only to Amazon's own devices, but to
software running on computers and phones and tablets, including
some of Amazon's competitors.

Kindle Touch is a new e-Ink device with an infrared touch
display, similar to some of the technology used by Barnes &
Noble, Sony or Kobo. But it costs a lot less: just $99 for basic
model with Wi-Fi, or $149 for the Kindle Touch 3G with free
unlimited mobile connectivity. (Kudos to Amazon for keeping
unlimited global mobile alive!)

Victor J. Blue/ Wired.com

The Kindle Touch also features an in-depth search index called
X-Ray. Books include a built-in index -- really a kind of
mini-encyclopedic side file - that keys in to notable phrases and
characters in the book. It's backed-up by Amazon subsidiary
Shelfari, but it doesn't live within the cloud: it's stored locally
and paired with the e-book file itself.

Don't worry if you love the old Kindle and don't care about
touchscreens. "We have many customers who expressly tell us they
don't want touch," Bezos says. So Amazon is also delivering a brand
new Kindle -- lighter, thinner, with faster guts inside -- without
a touchscreen, but a five-way navigator and page-turn buttons for
$79. This new Kindle (Kindle 4?) is shipping today. Amazon is also
pairing this Kindle's Special Offers ads with Amazon Local, for
local deals, not just coupons for stuff to buy at Amazon.com.

The Kindle Fire, tablet, though, is the star of this show,
because it leverages everything Amazon offers, from its multimedia
sales to Amazon Prime streaming video service and free two-day
shipping and Amazon's industry-standard cloud infrastructure.

Bezos took the opportunity to take a shot at Apple, pointing out
the benefits of Amazon's instant, wireless WhisperSync against a
photograph of Apple's iconic USB cable. WhisperSync now works just
like Amazon books (or Netflix's ability to hold your place); watch
a video on the Kindle Fire, and you can pick it up at the same
place on your Amazon VOD-enabled TV or set-top box.

Video isn't the only draw of Kindle Fire over the mainstream
e-readers. It also has Silk, a web browser leveraged by Amazon's
EC2 cloud processing power. Bezos calls it "a split browser." It
promises to use that extra computation power to do all of the DNS,
TCP/IP, interactions, etc., on the back-end to make Silk much, much
faster than competing mobile browsers. It also stores, reformats
and compresses common instances of over-sized media designed for
the desktop for faster mobile delivery. An Amazon engineer calls it
"a limitless cache" to optimise the last-mile delivery between the
web and the tablet.

And yes: Silk runs Flash.

Amazon's unveiled a family of devices that stays true to its
mission of bringing digital reading and media devices to as many
people as possible. Now we have to see just how this market can
grow.